‘I understand,’ said Waldo.
‘I don’t care whether you understand or not,’ said the consul, ‘I want you to act. Shoot if needful, and shoot straight.’ And he tramped off.
Hassan presently appeared, and Waldo drank from his water-bottle as nearly all of its contents as Hassan would permit. After his departure Waldo’s first alertness soon gave place to mere endurance of the monotony of watching and the intensity of the heat. His discomfort became suffering, and what with the fury of the dry glare, the pangs of thirst and his bewilderment of mind, Waldo was moving in a waking dream by the time Hassan returned with two donkeys and a mule laden with brushwood. Behind the beasts straggled the guard.
Waldo’s trance became a nightmare when the smoke took effect and the battle began. He was, however, not only not required to join in the killing, but was enjoined to keep back. He did keep very much in the background, seeing only so much of the slaughter as his curiosity would not let him refrain from viewing. Yet he felt all a murderer as he gazed at the ten small carcasses laid out arow, and the memory of his vigil and its end, indeed of the whole day, though it was the day of his most marvelous adventure, remains to him as the broken recollections of a phantasmagoria.
On the morning of his memorable peril Waldo had waked early. The experiences of his sea-voyage, the sights at Gibraltar, at Port Said, in the canal, at Suez, at Aden, at Muscat, and at Basrah had formed an altogether inadequate transition from the decorous regularity of house and school life in New England to the breathless wonder of the desert immensities.
Everything seemed unreal, and yet the reality of its strangeness so besieged him that he could not feel at home in it, he could not sleep heavily in a tent. After composing himself to sleep, he lay long conscious and awakened early, as on this morning, just at the beginning of the false-dawn.
The consul was fast asleep, snoring loudly. Waldo dressed quietly and went out; mechanically, without any purpose or forethought, taking his gun. Outside he found Hassan, seated, his gun across his knees, his head sunk forward, as fast asleep as the consul. Ali and Ibrahim had left the camp the day before for supplies. Waldo was the only waking creature about; for the guards, camped some little distance off, were but logs about the ashes of their fire. Meaning merely to enjoy, under the white glow of the false-dawn, the magical reappearance of the constellations and the short last glory of the star-laden firmament, that brief coolness which compensated a trlfle for the hot morning, the fiery day and the warmish night, he seated himself on a rock, some paces from the tent and twice as far from the guards. Turning his gun in his hands he felt an irresistible temptation to wander off by himself, to stroll alone through the fascinating emptiness of the arid landscape.
When he had begun camp life he had expected to find the consul, that combination of sportsman, explorer and archaeologist, a particularly easy-going guardian. He had looked forward to absolutely untramelled liberty in the spacious expanse of the limitless wastes. The reality he had found exactly the reverse of his preconceptions. The consul’s first injunction was:
‘Never let yourself get out of sight of me or of Hassan unless he or I send you off with Ali or Ibrahim. Let nothing tempt you to roam about alone. Even a ramble is dangerous. You might lose sight of the camp before you knew it.’
At first Waldo acquiesced, later he protested. ‘I have a good pocket-compass. I know how to use it. I never lost my way in the Maine woods.’
‘No Kourds in the Maine woods,’ said the consul.
Yet before long Waldo noticed that the few Kourds they encountered seemed simple-hearted, peaceful folk. No semblance of danger or even of adventure had appeared. Their armed guard of a dozen greasy tatterdemalions had passed their time in uneasy loafing.
Likewise Waldo noticed that the consul seemed indifferent to the ruins they passed by or encamped among, that his feeling for sites and topography was cooler than lukewarm, that he showed no ardor in the pursuit of the scanty and uninteresting game.
He had picked up enough of several dialects to hear repeated conversations about ‘them.’ ‘Have you heard of any about here?’ ‘Has one been killed?’ ‘Any traces of them in this district?’ And such queries he could make out in the various talks with the natives they met; as to what ‘they’ were he received no enlightenment.
Then he had questioned Hassan as to why he was so restricted in his movements. Hassan spoke some English and regaled him with tales of Afrits, ghouls, specters and other uncanny legendary presences; of the jinn of the waste, appearing in human shape, talking all languages, ever on the alert to ensnare infidels; of the woman whose feet turned the wrong way at the ankles, luring the unwary to a pool and there drowning her victims; of the malignant ghosts of dead brigands, more terrible than their living fellows; of the spirit in the shape of a wild-ass, or of a gazelle, enticing its pursuers to the brink of a precipice and itself seeming to run ahead upon an expanse of sand, a mere mirage, dissolving as the victim passed the brink and fell to death; of the sprite in the semblance of a hare feigning a limp, or of a ground-bird feigning a broken wing, drawing its pursuer after it till he met death in an unseen pit or well-shaft.
Ali and Ibrahim spoke no English. As far as Waldo could understand their long harangues, they told similar stories or hinted at dangers equally vague and imaginary. These childish bogy-tales merely whetted Waldo’s craving for independence.
Now, as he sat on a rock, longing to enjoy the perfect sky, the clear, early air, the wide, lonely landscape, along with the sense of having it to himself, it seemed to him that the consul was merely innately cautious, over-cautious. There was no danger. He would have a fine leisurely stroll, kill something perhaps and certainly be back in camp before the sun grew hot. He stood up.
Some hours later he was seated on a fallen coping-stone in the shadow of a ruined tomb. All the country they had been traversing is full of tombs and remains of tombs, prehistoric, Bactrian, old Persian, Parthian, Sassanian, or Mohammedan, scattered everywhere in groups or solitary. Vanished utterly are the faintest traces of the cities, towns, and villages, ephemeral houses or temporary huts, in which had lived the countless generations of mourners who had reared these tombs.
The tombs, built more durably than mere dwellings of the living, remained. Complete or ruinous, or reduced to mere fragments, they were everywhere. In that district they were all of one type. Each was domed and below was square, its one door facing eastward and opening into a large empty room, behind which were the mortuary chambers.
In the shadow of such a tomb Waldo sat. He had shot nothing, had lost his way, had no idea of the direction of the camp, was tired, warm and thirsty. He had forgotten his water-bottle.
He swept his gaze over the vast, desolate prospect, the unvaried turquoise of the sky arched above the rolling desert. Far reddish hills along the skyline hooped in the less distant brown hillocks which, without diversifying it, hummocked the yellow landscape. Sand and rocks with a lean, starved bush or two made up the nearer view, broken here and there by dazzling white or streaked, grayish, crumbling ruins. The sun had not been long above the horizon, yet the whole surface of the desert was quivering with heat.
As Waldo sat viewing the outlook a woman came round the corner of the tomb. All the village women Waldo had seen had worn yashmaks or some other form of face-covering or veil. This woman was bareheaded and unveiled. She wore some sort of yellowish-brown garment which enveloped her from neck to ankles, showing no waist line. Her feet, in defiance of the blistering sands, were bare.
At sight of Waldo she stopped and stared at him as he at her. He remarked the un-European posture of her feet, not at all turned out, but with the inner lines parallel. She wore no anklets, he observed, no bracelets, no necklace or earrings. Her bare arms he thought the most muscular he had ever seen on a human being. Her nails were pointed and long, both on her hands and feet. Her hair was black, short and tousled, yet she did not look wild or uncomely. Her eyes smiled and her lips had the effect of smi
ling, though they did not part ever so little, not showing at all the teeth behind them.
`What a pity,’ said Waldo aloud, ‘that she does not speak English.’
‘I do speak English,’ said the woman, and Waldo noticed that as she spoke, her lips did not perceptibly open. ‘What does the gentleman want?’
‘You speak English!’ Waldo exclaimed, jumping to his feet. ‘What luck! Where did you learn it?’
‘At the mission school,’ she replied, an amused smile playing about the corners of her rather wide, unopening mouth. ‘What can be done for you?’ She spoke with scarcely any foreign accent, but very slowly and with a sort of growl running along from syllable to syllable.
‘I am thirsty,’ said Waldo, ‘and I have lost my way.’
‘Is the gentleman living in a brown tent, shaped like half a melon?’ she inquired, the queer, rumbling note drawling from one word to the next, her lips barely separated.
‘Yes, that is our camp,’ said Waldo.
‘I could guide the gentleman that way,’ she droned; ‘but it is far, and there is no water on that side.’
‘I want water first,’ said Waldo, ‘or milk.’
‘If you mean cow’s milk, we have none. But we have goat’s milk. There is to drink where I dwell,’ she said, sing-songing the words. ‘It is not far. It is the other way.’
‘Show me,’ said he.
She began to walk, Waldo, his gun under his arm, beside her. She trod noiselessly and fast. Waldo could scarcely keep up with her. As they walked he often fell behind and noted how her swathing garments clung to a lithe, shapely back, neat waist and firm hips. Each time he hurried and caught up with her, he scanned her with intermittent glances, puzzled that her waist, so well-marked at the spine, showed no particular definition in front; that the outline of her from neck to knees, perfectly shapeless under her wrappings, was without any waistline or suggestion of firmness or undulation. Likewise he remarked the amused flicker in her eyes and the compressed line of her red, her too red lips.
‘How long were you in the mission school?’ he inquired.
‘Four years,’ she replied.
‘Are you a Christian?’ he asked.
‘The Free-folk do not submit to baptism,’ she stated simply, but with rather more of the droning growl between her words.
He felt a queer shiver as he watched the scarcely moved lips through which the syllables edged their way.
‘But you are not veiled,’ he could not resist saying.
‘The Free-folk,’ she rejoined, ‘are never veiled.’
‘Then you are not a Mohammedan?’ he ventured.
‘The Free-folk are not Moslems.’
‘Who are the Free-folk?’ he blurted out incautiously.
She shot one baleful glance at him. Waldo remembered that he had to do with an Asiatic. He recalled the three permitted questions.
‘What is your name?’ he inquired.
‘Amina,’ she told him.
‘That is a name from the “Arabian Nights”,’ he hazarded.
‘From the foolish tales of the believers,’ she sneered. ‘The Free-folk know nothing of such follies.’ The unvarying shutness of her speaking lips, the drawly burr between the syllables, struck him all the more as her lips curled but did not open.
‘You utter your words in a strange way,’ he said.
‘Your language is not mine,’ she replied.
‘How is it that you learned my language at the mission school and are not a Christian?’
‘They teach all at the mission school,’ she said, ‘and the maidens of the Free-folk are like the other maidens they teach, though the Free-folk when grown are not as town-dwellers are. Therefore they taught me as any town-bred girl, not knowing me for what I am.’
‘They taught you well,’ he commented.
‘I have the gift of tongues,’ she uttered enigmatically, with an odd note of triumph burring the words through her unmoving lips.
Waldo felt a horrid shudder all over him, not only at her uncanny words, but also from mere faintness.
‘Is it far to your home?’ he breathed.
‘It is there,’ she said, pointing to the doorway of a large tomb just before them.
The wholly open arch admitted them into a fairly spacious interior, cool with the abiding temperature of thick masonry. There was no rubbish on the floor. Waldo, relieved to escape the blistering glare outside, seated himself on a block of stone midway between the door and the inner partition-wall, resting his gun-butt on the floor. For the moment he was blinded by the change from the insistent brilliance of the desert morning to the blurred gray light of the interior.
When his sight cleared he looked about and remarked, opposite the door, the ragged hole which laid open the desecrated mausoleum. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness he was so startled that he stood up. It seemed to him that from its four corners the room swarmed with naked children. To his inexperienced conjecture they seemed about two years old, but they moved with the assurance of boys of eight or ten.
‘Whose are these children?’ he exclaimed.
‘Mine,’ she said.
‘All yours?’ he protested.
‘All mine,’ she replied, a curious suppressed boisterousness in her demeanor.
‘But there are twenty of them,’ he cried.
‘You count badly in the dark,’ she told him. ‘There are fewer.’
‘There certainly are a dozen,’ he maintained, spinning round as they danced and scampered about.
‘The Free-people have large families,’ she said.
‘But they are all of one age,’ Waldo exclaimed, his tongue dry against the roof of his mouth.
She laughed, an unpleasant, mocking laugh, clapping her hands. She was between him and the doorway, and as most of the light came from it he could not see her lips.
‘Is not that like a man! No woman would have made that mistake.’
Waldo was confuted and sat down again. The children circulated around him, chattering, laughing, giggling, snickering, making noises indicative of glee.
‘Please get me something cool to drink,’ said Waldo, and his tongue was not only dry but big in his mouth.
‘We shall have to drink shortly,’ she said, ‘but it will be warm.’
Waldo began to feel uneasy. The children pranced around him, jabbering strange, guttural noises, licking their lips, pointing at him, their eyes fixed on him, with now and then a glance at their mother.
‘Where is the water?’
The woman stood silent, her arms hanging at her sides, and it seemed to Waldo she was shorter than she had been.
‘Where is the water?’ he repeated.
‘Patience, patience,’ she growled, and came a step near to him.
The sunlight struck upon her back and made a sort of halo about her hips. She seemed still shorter than before. There was a something furtive in her bearing, and the little ones sniggered evilly.
At that instant two rifle shots rang out almost as one. The woman fell face downward on the floor. The babies shrieked in a shrill chorus. Then she leapt up from all fours with an explosive suddenness, staggered in a hurled, lurching rush toward the hole in the wall, and, with a frightful yell, threw up her arms and whirled backward to the ground, doubled and contorted like a dying fish, stiffened, shuddered and was still. Waldo, his horrified eyes fixed on her face, even in his amazement noted that her lips did not open.
The children, squealing faint cries of dismay, scrambled through the hole in the inner wall, vanishing into the inky void beyond. The last had hardly gone when the consul appeared in the doorway, his smoking gun in his hand.
‘Not a second too soon, my boy,’ he ejaculated. ‘She was just going to spring.’
He cocked his gun and prodded the body with the muzzle.
‘Good and dead,’ he commented. ‘What luck! Generally it takes, three or four bullets to finish one. I’ve known one with two bullets through her lungs to kill a man.’
&
nbsp; ‘Did you murder this woman?’ Waldo demanded fiercely.
‘Murder?’ the consul snorted. ‘Murder! Look at that.’
He knelt down and pulled open the full, close lips, disclosing not human teeth, but small incisors, cusped grinders, wide-spaced; and long, keen, overlapping canines, like those of a greyhound: a fierce, deadly, carnivorous dentition, menacing and combative.
Waldo felt a qualm, yet the face and form still swayed his horrified sympathy for their humanness.
‘Do you shoot women because they have long teeth?,’ Waldo insisted, revolted at the horrid death he had watched.
‘You are hard to convince,’ said the consul sternly. ‘Do you call that a woman?’
He stripped the clothing from the carcass.
Waldo sickened all over. What he saw was not the front of a woman, but more like the underside of an old fox-terrier with puppies, or of a white sow, with her second litter, from collar-bone to groin ten lolloping udders, two rows, mauled, stringy and flaccid.
‘What kind of a creature is it?’ he asked faintly.
‘A Ghoul, my boy,’ the consul answered solemnly, almost in a whisper.
‘I thought they did not exist,’ Waldo babbled. ‘I thought they were mythical, I thought there were none.’
‘I can very well believe that there are none in Rhode Island,’ the consul said gravely. ‘This is in Persia, and Persia is in Asia.’
The Message on the Slate
MRS LLEWELLYN had always held — in so far as she ever thought about the subject at all — that to consult a clairvoyant was not merely an imbecile folly, but a degrading action, nearly akin to crime. Now that she felt herself overmasteringly driven to such an unconscionable unworthiness she could not bring herself to do it openly. Anything underhand or secretive was utterly alien to her nature. She was a tall woman, notably well shaped, with unusual dignity of demeanor. The poise of her head would have appeared haughty but for the winning kindliness of her frequent smile. Her dark hair, dark eyes and very white skin accorded well with that abiding calm of her bearing which never seemed mere placidity in a face habitually lighted with interested comprehension. Like a cloudless springtime sunrise over limitless expanses of dewy prairies, she was enveloped in an atmosphere of spacious serenity of soul, and her appearance was entirely in consonance with her character. She was still a very beautiful woman, high-souled as she was beautiful and exceedingly straight-forward. Yet to drive in open day to a house bearing the displayed sign of a spirit-medium was more than she could do. Bidding her footman call for her later, much later, at her hairdresser’s, she dismissed her carriage at the main entrance of a department store. Leaving it by another entrance, she took a street car for the neighbourhood she sought. The neighborhood was altogether different from what she had anticipated; the houses, by no means small, were even handsome; not least handsome that of the clairvoyant. And it was very well kept, the pavement and the steps clean, the plate glass window panes bright, the shades and curtains new and tasteful, the silver doorknobs and door-bell fresh polished. There was a sign, indeed, but not the flaming horror her imagination had constructed from memories of signs seen in passing. This was a bit of glass set inside the big, bright pane of one of the parlor windows. It bore in small gold letters only the name, SALATHIEL VARGAS, and the word, CLAIRVOYANT.
The Stuff of Dreams: The Weird Stories of Edward Lucas White (Dover Horror Classics) Page 5
